The iron lance

EPILOGUE

We are the Seven, and we are the last.

Our long, lonely vigil is drawing to an end. A thousand years have come and gone since our illustrious order began-a thousand years of watching and waiting. In that time nations have risen, flourished, and crumbled, kings and potentates and dictators have strutted and preened and vanished, and the very stars have come within reach. But many things-most things-never change: children are born; they grow and marry, and raise families of their own in a world where the sun yet rises day by day, and the seasons make their sacred round. Tribes forever make war on their neighbours, goods change hands in gainful trade and wealth circulates the globe in an endless, ever-widening river. Always, always the tides of power sweep the world end to end.

So it has ever been, but soon it shall be no more. For the consummation of the age is at hand, and the True Path will be revealed at last. That time is hard upon us, friends. Whether in New York or Paris, London, Madrid, or Moscow, I look out of my hotel window to the busy streets below and I see the world dissolving, crumbling away before my eyes. The old world is fast returning to the chaos from which it was formed. Yet, the Holy Light, though dim, is not extinguished; the flame shall be renewed. The birth pains of the New World have begun.

Listen to the sirens in the night; listen to the bombs and the guns, and the screams of the victims, the angry shouts of the mobs in the streets. Listen! In all these things is heard the galloping hoofbeats of the swift-flying steed: the Winged Messenger is coming. The Day of Reckoning is upon us. That which exists will not long endure.

So be it!